"Cheater," he said.
"You're just slow."
"I'm methodical."
"You're slow, Dad."
She ate the first crab. He watched her eat it, and then the second, and then he slid one of his over to her and she ate that too, and she did not look up at him or toward the house while she did it, and she did not eat fast, and she did not hide anything in her pockets. The creek lay black and still below the deck, and every once in a while a fish jumped somewhere out in the dark, and the string lights made little bright reflections on the water.
After the fourth crab she stopped, and wiped her fingers on a paper towel, slowly, one at a time, and said, without looking at him, "Why didn't you know?"
He had been waiting for that question for three weeks. He had thought about how to answer it on the bridges of a dozen ships. He had come up with a lot of answers, and most of them were true, and all of them were excuses. He was gone four nights a week. He was tired. Celeste was very good at it. He had trusted his wife, because you were supposed to trust your wife. He had been so relieved, after June, to have someone else in the house who seemed to know what she was doing.
He did not say any of them.
"Because I didn't look," he said. "I wanted everything to be okay so badly that I didn't look. And when I did see something, I let somebody else tell me what it meant, instead of asking you. That's the truth, Sky. That's the whole answer. There isn't a better one. I'm sorry."
She was quiet for a long time.